Submitted articles are sent to qualified reviewers for peer review. To see what may be expected from the review report, please consult the 'For Reviewers' section of the present website. It is AIJ policy to obtain three reviews (usually) or two reviews (in special circumstances) for submitted papers. The use of only two reviews was more common a few years ago.

Reviewers are asked to return their review within 6-8 weeks (4-6 weeks for Research Notes). Actual reviewing time from the author's point of view may be significantly more, because of both the time it takes to recruit reviewers, and the additional delays by some of the reviewers.

A few years ago the Journal had some problems that resulted in very long reviewing time for a number of submissions. These problems have now largely been overcome through the introduction of more streamlined procedures. The average time to a first decision on a submitted paper has been well under 100 days for several years now.

The first review stage may result in the article being rejected, accepted, or given a 'conditional accept'. The latter is an invitation to submit a significantly revised article which will be subjected to a second round of review.

Second review stage

If the article is given a 'conditional accept' then the author has the option of revising the article and resubmitting it, and it will be considered as the same article from the administrative point of view. The revised article should be accompanied by a memorandum where the author explains whether and how she/he has acted on the suggestions by the reviewers. It is of course not obligatory to meet all the reviewers' requests, but then an explanation of why this has not be done must be supplied.

Even if an article has been rejected, it may sometimes be worthwhile to submit a new article that is based on similar contents as the first one, but where improvements have been made based on reviewers' comments as well as in other ways. Such submissions will be registered as new submissions from our point of view.

An article can normally not obtain 'conditional accept' more than once, so the reviewing of a revised article will normally result in either an accept or a reject. Exceptions to this rule are rare.

Anonymity

Authors will not know the identity of the reviewers, unless the reviewer herself chooses to divulge their identity. Reviewers know the identity of the authors. Reviewers normally get to see the other reviews of the same article after they have returned their own review, but will normally not know the identity of the other reviewers. Exceptions to the last rule are sometimes made in case of strongly conflicting reviews, where the reviewers may be invited to interact in order to find out whether this leads one of them to adopt the other one's position on the paper.